Research Interests:

My research interests focus on how we perceive the sounds of our environment, and particularly the sounds made by everyday objects. When we hear such sounds, what we perceive is not, or not only, an acoustic signal with abstract properties, as color might be for vision, but "the sound of something happening". Many works have shown the great ability of human listeners to identify the events causing a sound, and to recover their properties, and my goals are to study this ability.
Specifically, my current projects study how human listeners organize what they hear, and how they are able to identify the properties of the events causing sounds through categorization experiments. I am also very interested in how people use vocal imitations to communicate a sound that they have heard, or that they imagine.
The results of these research might apply to develop evaluation methods for the design of sounds of everyday objects and computer interfaces, as well as to perceptually based signal processing tools.